The Azure Dragon Guild's intelligence division was renowned throughout China for its speed and thoroughness. When Lin Xia gave an order, she expected results, and she got them in less than twenty-four hours. The file that appeared on her terminal was, however, the most frustratingly paradoxical document she had ever read.
Subject: Wei Heng.
Age: 17.
Affiliation: Fuzhou No. 7 High School, Senior Year.Family: Father, Wei Jianjun, factory foreman. Mother, Su Ling, part-time cleaner. No siblings.
Financial Status: Low-income. Family apartment is a rental. Subject has no registered assets.
Known Abilities: None. Not registered with the Hunter's Association. No recorded awakening event.
Lin Xia stared at the screen, her perfectly sculpted eyebrows drawing together in a tight knot of disbelief. This was her ghost? Her mysterious mastermind, the "player" who spoke of her as a "piece"? A seventeen-year-old high school student from a poor family? It was impossible. It was ludicrous.
"Is this a joke?" she asked the analyst standing at attention before her desk.
"No, Captain," the man replied, sweating slightly under her intense gaze. "We've triple-checked. Facial recognition is a 99.8% match. We've cross-referenced school records, public census data, and even his parents' employment histories. This is him. As far as the world is concerned, Wei Heng is an ordinary, unremarkable high school senior."
Unremarkable. The word was so utterly at odds with the memory of the boy in the steel mill. The memory of those eyes—ancient, cold, and filled with an authority that had made her, an S-Rank prodigy and the heir to the Lin Clan, feel like a novice.
"There's more," the analyst continued, bringing up another file. "The orphanage outbreak. The official report states the Hunter's Association response team handled the situation. But we pulled the raw satellite thermal imaging from that night. There was a single, intense energy signature that appeared and neutralized all threats in under ninety seconds. The signature's location matches where Wei Heng was last seen before he vanished from the area's surveillance."
"And Veridian Bioscience?" Lin Xia pressed.
"A complete ghost company. Registered offshore, funded by a series of cryptocurrency mixers that make the funds completely untraceable," the analyst confirmed. "It has no employees, no products, no history. It exists only as a name on a deed and a bank account with enough money to buy a small country."
Lin Xia dismissed the analyst and leaned back in her chair, the pieces of the puzzle swirling in her mind. A poor high school student with no registered abilities. An untraceable fortune. The skill to single-handedly eliminate a monster swarm. The foresight to buy a worthless factory. And the sheer audacity to look her in the eye and call her a pawn.
'He's wearing a mask,' she concluded. 'A perfect, mundane mask that hides a monster.' The mystery, far from being solved, had only deepened. This Wei Heng was not just an unknown variable; he was a living contradiction, a paradox that her logical, ordered world could not explain. And that made him dangerously interesting.
Later that evening, she stood in the serene rooftop garden of the Lin Clan estate, reporting to her grandfather, Lin Jianyu, the venerable patriarch of the family. The old man was pruning a bonsai tree with meticulous care, his movements slow and deliberate.
"A boy," he said, not looking up from his work, after she had finished her report. "You were intimidated by a seventeen-year-old boy."
"I was not intimidated," Lin Xia corrected, her tone sharp. "I was... cautious. There is more to him than his file suggests, Grandfather. His eyes... they were not the eyes of a boy."
Lin Jianyu finally set down his shears and turned to her. His gaze was as sharp as it had been fifty years ago when he built the Azure Dragon Guild from nothing. "The world is a bigger ocean than you know, little Xia. There are old sharks that sleep in the deep, and young krakens that are just learning the strength of their tentacles. You have only ever swum in the clear, sunlit waters of our influence. This boy... he may be from the abyss."
"What should I do?" she asked.
"Watch," her grandfather advised. "A true player does not reveal their strategy with their first move. Let him place more pieces on the board. Observe his patterns. Then, when you understand his game, you will know how to dismantle it."
In his command center loft, Wei Heng watched a live feed on one of his monitors. It showed Lin Xia speaking with her grandfather in the rooftop garden, the image crystal clear, the audio perfectly captured by a drone the size of a dragonfly hovering a hundred meters away.
"They've taken the bait," Mei Ling's voice came, not from a speaker, but directly into his mind through a simple Qi-based telepathic link they had begun to practice. "The Azure Dragon Guild has flagged your public identity. They are actively monitoring you."
'As expected,' Wei Heng thought back, his own mental voice a calm, deep resonance. 'My public identity is the perfect camouflage. A wall of mundane impossibility that will keep them guessing. While they watch the shadow, the hand moves unseen.'
He turned his attention to his other pillars. Gao Qiang was in a private training facility Wei Heng had rented, a converted warehouse on the city's outskirts. He was practicing the 'Unmoving Mountain Foundation Method,' his body radiating a faint, earthy yellow glow as he drew Qi from the ground. His progress was steady, his foundation becoming as solid as the bedrock he stood upon.
Sun An was in his new, state-of-the-art laboratory two floors below the loft. He was hunched over a high-resolution microscope, analyzing the cellular structure of the Gorgon-Crawler's core. Holographic displays around him showed complex biological data, his mind completely absorbed in unraveling the secrets of monster biology and life force.
His three pillars were growing, each in their own domain. But they were still separate entities. It was time to unite them under a single banner.
"Mei Ling, Sun An," Wei Heng projected his thoughts to them. "Phase Two begins. It is time to give our organization a public face."
He laid out the instructions with swift, precise clarity. Sun An, through Veridian Bioscience, would provide the necessary capital—a staggering 200 million yuan—to meet the Hunter's Association's requirements for establishing a new, A-Rank registered guild. Mei Ling would handle the digital paperwork, creating a flawless, legitimate application that would pass all of the Association's stringent checks.
"The guild's name will be Aegis," Wei Heng instructed. "And I will be the registered Guild Master."
There was a pause in their mental link.
'Sir,' Sun An's thought came, tinged with scientific skepticism. 'While I do not question your authority, registering a seventeen-year-old with no public record as the Guild Master of a new, heavily funded organization will... attract an unprecedented level of scrutiny.'
'That is the point,' Wei Heng replied. 'The Lin Clan is looking for a ghost. I will give them a target so absurd, so illogical, that it will only deepen their confusion. They will waste their resources trying to understand the 'why' of my existence, while we focus on the 'what' of our mission. It is the ultimate misdirection.'
The application was submitted an hour later. In the bureaucratic world of the Hunter's Association, such a thing would normally take weeks to process. But an application backed by a 200-million-yuan liquid capital deposit was not a normal application. It was fast-tracked, flagged, and pushed to the top of every administrator's desk.
The news broke the next morning on the Fuzhou Hunter community's internal network.
[Founding Members: 4]
The announcement was a bomb dropped into a quiet pond. New guilds were rare. New guilds with that level of funding were unheard of. But a new, mega-funded guild led by a seventeen-year-old nobody? It was the talk of every guild hall and hunter bar in the city. Who was this kid? Was he the heir of some hidden billionaire family? Was it a joke?
In her office, Lin Xia stared at the official notice on her screen. The name. The age. It all clicked into place, but the picture it formed was an infuriating, impossible mess. The ghost she had been hunting had just stepped out of the shadows, painted a giant target on his own back, and openly declared himself a player on the board.
Her grandfather had told her to watch. Now, she had something to watch.
Her lips curved into a sharp, competitive smile. "Wei Heng," she whispered to the empty room. "Let's see what kind of game you're playing.